Since the advent of the global-based Internet, the hypertext transport protocol that the World Wide Web (“WWW” or “Web”) utilizes has rapidly evolved as a standard protocol for information retrieval systems for distributing, discovering, and accessing content of various types. The sheer volume of content available from the Web continues to accelerate. This is due, at least in part, to the rapid proliferation of digitized images, video, and audio, and perhaps more importantly, to the increasing ubiquitous availability of the underlying Internet as a medium for accessing and exchanging content in a relatively inexpensive fashion.
It is important to be able to target Internet users in a manner that is most likely to attract their attention and encourage them to download, view, subscribe, or otherwise purchase the marketed content. From the perspective of Internet users, a Web site visitor must engage in the tedious and time-consuming process of browsing multiple sites to search for informative, entertaining or otherwise interesting content. At each site, multiple content items must be carefully sorted and analyzed, before the visitor may find an item of interest.
Therefore due to the vast and continuous growth of content available on Web sites, it has become increasingly more difficult to search for highly relevant content. This difficulty is due, at least in part, to a lack of effective tools to support targeted exploration of information repositories. For example, tagging is one tool that is useful for exploring information repositories. Generally, tagging is a process by which users assign labels in the form of keywords to contents with a purpose to share, discover, and recover the tagged content items. Discovery enables users to find new and interesting content items tagged by other users. Recovery enables a user to recall content items that were previously discovered and tagged.
Recently, an increasing number of tagging services are becoming available on the web, such as the FLICKR™ Web service, the DEL.ICIO.US™ Web service, and the MY WEB 2.0 Web service. The FLICKR™ Web service enables users to tag photos and share them with contacts or make them publicly available. The DEL.ICIO.US™ Web service allows users to tag uniform resource locators (URLs) and share tagged URLs with the public. The MY WEB 2.0 web service provides a web-scale social search engine to enable users to find, use, share and expand human knowledge. MY WEB 2.0 allows users to save and tag content items available on the Web, allowing for browsing and searching of content items, as well as sharing content items within a personalized community or with the public.
By analyzing tags associated with content items, a search engine, for example, can search across one or more combinations of tags to find specific content. Even this technique, however, produces a substantially large result set that is difficult to manage and present to a user in meaningful manner. Accordingly, Internet users need to be able to quickly filter out content (e.g., search results) that is not written or recorded in a preferred language, restricted to a preferred geographic region, consistent with local customs or regulations, or several other principles that determine the relevancy of search results.
As more content providers take advantage of the Internet, and as user expectations of Internet applications continue to grow in sophistication, conventional systems of browsing or searching for content have grown inadequate. Conventional systems lack easy-to-learn interactive user interface designs and useful navigational tools for browsing content items.
Accordingly, there is a need for an intelligent and efficient technique for browsing relevant content items from a variety of sources over one or more networks, such as the Web, using a number of disparate client devices.